It's no wonder that the endless runner genre has flourished on the iPhone: simple concepts and control schemes tend to work best on touch devices, and running for your life is about as basic a game premise as you can get. Luckily, thanks to inventive developers, we haven't tired of this fast-paced template, as there's a wealth of variations on the theme in the App Store with many even available for free. Need a getaway game that can send you vaulting up the leaderboards while you're actually just sitting around? Here are our picks for the 10 best endless runner games available today for iPhone.

If Rampage and Metal Slug produced an unholy offspring, it might resemble something like Destructopus: Total Rampage. The game’s presentation is very telling of its personality: a double-bass-fueled metal song plays over the intro while a cartoonish silhouette wreaks havoc on the ruins of a city in the background, with an animation style that’s close to squigglevision.